Today, I am very pleased to announce our Fall 2014 Release which is packed with exciting new features and platform enhancements. We gave a sneak peak of some new features at AppSphere back in November, but for those who couldn’t make it to Las Vegas I wanted to highlight what our team has been working on. At a high level, the features and capabilities can be grouped into four themes:

Cutting edge collaboration capabilities

Deep visibility into complex applications

Application Analytics

Platform collection & processing enhancements

Modern collaborative troubleshooting for rapid resolution

The Application Intelligence platform has several new features that make it easier for DevOps teams to collaborate in full context to reduce mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR) and learn from the past to better manage future issues.

Virtual war room

In traditional war room scenarios, there is a mix of chat windows, online meeting rooms, teleconference calls, emails, and different dashboards on everyone’s screens which make the process painful and really difficult for remote employees to participate in. To add to that, each person in the room is focused on Mean-Time-To-Innocence metric than MTTR. After resolution, this information is usually lost and cannot be accessed again in the future.

With the troubleshooting virtual war room capabilities, AppDynamics now provides customers with a powerful ad-hoc virtual space that gives Ops & Dev teams one place they can chat, make system changes in real time, view and annotate events on second-interval charts so everyone (even non-AppDynamics users) can collaborate in a view that unites the different aspects of troubleshooting to provide common context and common data to all. The entire decision-making process can be indexed in knowledge management systems.

By leveraging a common view and context of the environment during troubleshooting exercises, AppDynamics reduces the time it takes to resolve application issues, reduces the business impact of unplanned outages, and allows organizations to learn from past troubleshooting situations.

Scheduled & shareable reports

One important aspect of improving collaboration is making sure key stakeholders have access to necessary information whenever they need it. In order to get that information, usually someone had to log into a monitoring system, configure a report, run it, then manually send it over to a colleague for consumption each time they wanted to share data.

With the new emailed reports feature, DevOps teams can setup and schedule reports to be shared via email with anyone they’d like.

Now, AppDynamics customers can foster a more open and transparent culture by making it extremely easy to share reports across an organization.

Companion iOS app (beta)

IT Ops teams typically have some kind of alerting & ticketing system already set up, but what happens when they aren’t at the office or don’t have access to their laptop?

With the introduction of AppDynamics’ native mobile app, customers can be sent push notifications when alerts are triggered and can access KPIs for their mission-critical applications straight from their iOS device.

Customers can now easily access AppDynamics notifications and application metrics while on the go!

Deep visibility into complex applications

AppDynamics has introduced functionality to make it easy for ops teams to monitor and troubleshoot the most complex interactions and transactions in modern application environments.

Business flow

Large enterprise business architectures are typically built on multiple large applications such as a fulfillment application, inventory application, etc., service oriented architectures that oftentimes are shared across different business processes. Getting both a macro level view of the dependencies and drilling down into a particular service are required for proper performance management.

The Business flow feature allows customers to be flexible in terms of how they define and visualize their applications and dependencies, and enables app to app metrics and flow map visualizations, snapshot drill-down to a different app, and role-based access control so IT Ops teams can see how their apps are interacting with shared services at a high level, without needing drill-down access into the service itself. Separation of concerns is used in this context.

Now, customer applications are more manageable without loss of control.

Asynchronous transactions & improved visualizations

Async transactions are notoriously difficult to trace and monitor because tracking the true end-to-end latency of these requests is nearly impossible. When IT Ops teams don’t have visibility into the most complex transactions they are effectively disadvantaged at monitoring their environments due to blind spots. Most real world apps have async transactions in them.

AppDynamics automatically traces and monitors all async requests to give visibility into these complex distributed environments. With our new release we’ve taken this to the next level, giving you a model to easily track overall latency and the ability to customize when long running async business processes start and stop.

IT Ops teams now receive powerful granular visibility into how these transactions impact overall application performance and the end user experience.

WebSocket support

Within traditional monitoring solutions, WebSocket requests usually appear to be very slow / stalled transactions since they have long running/open connections. So, very often they may receive what is essentially a ‘false positive.’

Customers now have the ability to understand the actual performance of WebSocket connections from the end user perspective, identify the business transaction using the websocket URL, and monitor the true latency of requests.

With this visibility into WebSocket requests, AppDynamics delivers a comprehensive view of the performance of these requests to better arm IT Ops teams with the real-time view they need to uncover abnormal WebSocket behavior.

Application Analytics

Today’s software-driven businesses operate in highly distributed environments where each business function is a modular standalone application. These applications are generating humongous amounts of structured and unstructured data that are siloed in nature as well. AppDynamics Application Analytics eliminates these silos by automatically propagating end-to-end business transaction context across analytics datasets without the need for any application code changes. By leveraging Application Analytics, business and IT users can now quickly unlock actionable business insights to answer more meaningful questions than ever before, and all in real time.

Platform collection & processing enhancements

We’ve added native support for a number of different technologies that are prevalent across our customer base. With the Fall 2014 release, AppDynamics has added support for:

WebMethods

TIBCO

Cassandra backends

SQL Azure databases

Single page apps

C/C++ (currently in beta)

We’ve also eliminated the pain of collecting and storing large amounts of metrics generated from complex enterprise applications. AppDynamics announces an infinitely scalable metrics store, available via on-premise or SaaS deployments. Now, we enable customers to capture and analyze trillions of events with ease!